Australia's six state governments and environmental economists said Australia and the United States needed to introduce carbon trading, where polluting industries switching to cleaner technology can sell left-over emissions allocations. They said national trading schemes would act as a financial incentive for industry to invest in new, cleaner technology.
"An on-going incentive, such as an emissions-trading scheme that would reward companies that invested in emission reductions, is needed to spread such technology throughout the industry," said the environment minister for Victoria state, John Thwaites.
But Australia and the United States, which have refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gases, remain opposed to binding limits on emissions and have refused to set up national trading schemes, similar to one in place across Europe. Washington said carbon trading would simply move industries and emissions from one country to another.
"If you impose a trade on CO2 (carbon dioxide), you're really pushing energy-intensive manufacturing out of our country to another country, where the greenhouse gases still go up into the atmosphere," James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, told Reuters. "So we have to be careful about a good tool, applied in the wrong setting," he said.
EDIT
And the right setting would be . . . John? Funny thing, this stance, given their unbounded faith in markets to solve each and every
other problem of human existence.
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/34449/story.htm